BY BENJAMIN J. KEELEOpinion

Open access to student-edited law journals

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HEN STUDENT­edited law journal ar­ticles are published, they generally reside in law libraries and

proprietary, subscription-based databas­es like LexisNexis, Westlaw, and HeinOn­line. Some journals have begun putting their content on their websites, making them available to a wider audience.

But how can we be sure that even more people have access to important legal scholarship? What about readers unfamiliar with typical legal databases or scholars, especially those in other countries, who cannot afford the access fees? How can we be sure that the litera­ture will remain accessible online for the long term, safe from business failures and obsolete file formats? Open access can address all these problems.

Open access means scholarly publica­tions are available without financial con­straints on the user except those neces­sary to use the Internet. Institutional repositories (IRs) are more than just web­sites where a journal is posted. IRs are databases of content administered by academic institutions, usually libraries.

There are two major advantages IRs have over regular websites. First, they generally use software that complies with data access standards that permit search engines (like Google Scholar) to index the content, making it easier to find. Second, IRs have the resources to migrate articles to new software formats and hardware, thus making long-term access much more likely.

Law journals are generally run by vol­unteers (authors and student editors usu­ally are not paid for their work) and subsi­dized by schools that serve the legal profession and general public.The general public often cannot afford the fees for sub­scription databases, thus leaving wunet a need for high-quality legal information.

Open access also is good for authors and journals because it increases their visibility and scholarly impact. Interdis­ciplinary scholarship will be advanced when scholars outside the legal academy

can access legal writings and analyze how law affects other disciplines. Many IRs also support other types of media files, so data sets, recordings of lectures and conferences, and other supporting material can be added, providing richer information than plain text can convey.

Many journals already put their print issues online and even have online supple­ments. This is a great start, but journals cannot fully seize the opportunity offered by open access without taking advantage of IRs' capacities for increased accessibil­ity and preservation.

Whatcan journal editors do to better as­sure long-term accessibilily for their jour­nal's content? See if the journal's law school or university has an IR. If so, deposit as much content as possible. If not, editors can encourage their university to establish one, make their own using open source IR software, or optimize their websites for search engines to increase accessibility. Journals also can digitize their back issues, expanding the content available.

Like most worthwhile projects, there are costs to making legal scholarship freely available online. There are opera­tional costs, such as creating digital files and hosting the content, but school li­braries may be willing to contribute. Some revenue from hard-copy subscrip­tions and database royalties may be sac­rificed, but open access and subscription models serve different parts of the mar­ket. And open access tends to increase the visibility of scholarly work, thus in­creasing revenue from reprint royalties.

Many recent journal articles are on­line, and law professors are accustomed to posting working drafts on sites like the Social Science Research Network and Be­press. It is time to put law journals online, easily accessible to all, and to keep them online by preserving them in IRs. Tech­savvy student editors are in an ideal po­sition to make that happen. ~1.

Benjamin J. Keele is a third-year student at Indiana University Maurer School of Law­Bloomington and editor in chief of the Indi­ana Journal of Global Legal Studies.

February 2009 I STUDENT LAWYER I 17